What Earth's Sunset Would Look Like If We Orbited Other Stars

The sunset is one of the most familiar, and yet one of the most spectacular, sights on Earth. But what would it look like if we orbited a star other than our Sun? Martin Vargic of Halcyon Maps made a series of beautiful doctored photographs to answer this question.

The brilliant colors that we see just before the sun sets for the night are the result of a process called scattering, in which light particles bounce off of molecules in Earth's atmosphere in all different directions. During sunrise and sunset, scattering occurs more than during the day because more of the Sun's light passes through the atmosphere. But if our sun were a different size, color, or brightness, the sunset would look very different.

Here is Vargic's best approximation, judging from what we know of each of these stars. He clarifies that there wouldn't be water or vegetation if we orbited these other stars, but otherwise it's consistent with our scientific knowledge of these stars: